Court drops 50% of Pirate Bay charges

Is the landmark piracy trial almost over before it's begun?

This week sees one of the major torrent trackers The Pirate Bay in court in Stockholm.

However, despite many claiming that this could well turn out to be the biggest court case in online file-sharing history, it could be almost over before it's begun?

"There has been high drama on the second day of the Pirate Bay trial," TorrentFreak.com reported earlier today, noting that, "due to serious shortcomings in the prosecution evidence, around 50 per cent of the charges in the case are going to have to be withdrawn."

Apparently the prosecution "cannot prove that the .torrent files he is using as evidence actually used The Pirate Bay's tracker" and "many of the screenshots being used clearly state there is no connection to the tracker."

The prosection also have failed to "adequately explain the function of DHT which allows for so called 'trackerless' torrents."

Charges dropped

Therefore, prosecutor Håkan Roswall has already had to drop all charges relating to "assisting copyright infringement", with the remaining charges now only relating to "assisting making available".

"This is a sensation. It is very rare to win half the target in just one-and-a-half days and it is clear that the prosecutor took strong note of what we said yesterday," according to defence lawyer Per E Samuelson.

Stay tuned for all the major updates on The Pirate Bay trial, while 'Twitterers' can follow the progress of the case minute-by-minute via updates on Twitter at twitter.com/spectrial.